Song and Dance

The other day I took Larrisa to a children’s song and dance class sponsored by the Big Brother Big Sister program. Turns out it wasn’t just for the kids; us “Bigs” were expected to participate too.

My singing and dancing abilities are limited, to say the least. I can stay mostly on tune if I’m familiar with the song, particularly if I have the music score, which helps me to see what the song is going to do next, so I have time to anticipate it.

I survived the voice warm-up exercises, but then we moved on to singing something from The Lion King, and I was hopeless.

First of all, I don’t know that music so I could not go by memory. Secondly, movie songs are difficult. They don’t tend to be simple melodies. I forgot which exact songs we were trying to sing (there were a few of them) but they had sections that were more like dramatic speaking than singing – except not quite. Sort of like musical speaking-singing. The problem with those sections was it was very hard for me to tell what note was actually being sung (if any).

The instructor had originally imagined we would sing to YouTube instrumental accompaniment (like karaoke), but soon discovered that we were not up for the challenge. So she quickly searched YouTube for some examples of the songs that included the singing and showed the lyrics!

Well, I thought the singing was hard…but then we moved on to dance. Oh my gosh, did I suck at that! I did fine for the warm-up exercises (jumping jacks). I can do jumping jacks without getting confused – or at least most of the time.

Then suddenly we were learning a dance routine. For some reason, I can’t seem to remember routines. Imagine someone saying an entire paragraph in a foreign language and you have to say it all back to them, in the right order, with the right pronunciation. And then do it again, 10 minutes later. That’s me with dance routines.

This was a small class, so there wasn’t any hiding in the back. And the kids were mostly teenagers, so expectations were fairly advanced. Each big-sister, little-sister pair were expected to take turns doing the routine by ourselves while everyone else watched us.

The instructor must have taken pity on us at one point, because when it came time to do solos in front of the class (not even in pairs this time – a complete solo), she told us to just freestyle. That decreased the technical challenge, but did not decrease the emotional challenge. When is the last time you did a freestyle solo dance in front of a group of strangers? (Sober.)

All I could do was just try to maintain my humor and confidence. I wanted to be a role model, and I think it’s useful to know how maintain poise when challenged. I just tried to be a good sport and encourage the kids and ignore my own failures.

Sorry, I didn’t take any pictures. I was too busy trying to survive!